Popular Blogs

Paradox of Social Democracy

Introduction

In later 60s in Paleolithic days few red blooded drastic events would had been caught dead within the Democratic Party. The period was the era of anti imperialist and student movements, of the SDS, of SNCC, of militant black movement, Black Panther party, league of the revolutionary black worker and the nascent rank filing movements among public and industrial service workers.

Main context

In those days the politics was on the streets and in mass direct action. The Democratic Party was acknowledged as the firmly wedded to the American imperialism which was expressed in the LBJ’s Vietnam War and not to mention the A-Bomb of the Harry Truman over the Hiroshima or bay Pigs of Kennedy or his cold war. Despite of the fact backs, poor and workers did vote in bulk for the Democratic Party and the party was viewed as anti working class, anti back and pro capitalist. Neither the blacks nor the workers controlled nor they participated in the party. It was surprising that the party never seeks to reveal the cruel anti labor Taft Hartley Act and it refused to place the Mississippi freedom democratic party at the 1964 conventions in the place of arch segregationist delegation of official and Kennedy presidency was unsuccessful to achieve the significant piece of the social legislation. Through vague notions of participatory democracy and corporate liberalism was that the party politico, labor bureaucratic, back petty bourgeois and service professional element s that constituted the core of the official reformism that could be never counted to put effect on the programs. The first generation grew up with the slogan of “never believe or trust a liberal” and their descendants did not abandon that credo. Therefore a new left politics were recognized to be a political and organizational independence from the forces of the official reformism, reliance on the militant direct actions to impose actions from outside. Direct democracy in the movement was an anathema to party, black bureaucratic and labor forces that dominated the official institutions and Democratic Party of liberalism.

Conclusion

Nowadays, the Democratic Party has not its fundamental principles since 60s. We live in different political world and mass direct action movement made reforms potential and provided material basis to speak for the rise of the radical organizations and the ideas had suffered more than the decade of the disastrous decline.